What an excellent and unique article! WordPress has grown out of a “blogging platform” to a full publishing platform. I like using WordPress if I can help it – especially if I don’t need the super-flexibility and customization of content types that Drupal has; I find that people generally find the administration section of WordPress more user-friendly than Drupal.

This is really a timely post for me. A client of mine had the Membership Directory plugin enhanced so he could add in more fields of data, which will make for a pretty nice directory when it is done.

Also, I have been looking for some kind of script/app to display the funny pics I come across and bombard my friend’s in-boxes and IM windows. The Ffffound Clone seems like it will do the trick, especially if I can post via FireFox with ScribeFire.

Great article Steven. I’m building a real estate site for a client now, using WordPress. It’s going to be great for non technical clients to use WP to publish house listings, and have their clients subscribe to their news letters and feeds.

How about using it as a fully fledged Geo-Blogging platform…?

http://wpmupremium.com/blog/2009/02/17/introducing-wpmu-gmaps/

It’s not quite ready for public consumption yet, but it does at least give you another idea about what can be done with Wordpress…

Can they be combined on a single installation? I notice Pittsburgh Designers is running an external job board – could that be an internal WP job board?

Similarly, I can’t find any examples of the Business Directory plugin being used on a site that’s not *entirely* a directory.

It seems to me the combination should be possible but I haven’t really checked. Got any good examples of people combining these things?

I never even imaged that WP could be used in these ways. Thanks for sharing.

Donnette,
There are a lot of different ways to use AdSense with a WP blog/site. You could add the code manually to the theme files, or many themes have AdSense integration where you can control things from the dashboard. There are also lots of plugins for AdSense and ad management. I don’t have one to recommend over any others, but if you do a Google search you’ll find a lot of options.

You forgot Alex Girard’s outstanding hack of WordPress to turn it into a social news/bookmarking site.
It’s called PressMark: http://bookmark.alexgirard.com/tag/pressmark/

nda

Pressmark is a delicious clone made with wordpress:

http://github.com/alx/pressmark

Example:

http://bookmark.alexgirard.com/

very nice! I didn’t realize wordpress was so versatile. I primarily work with Joomla, using wordpress strictly for blogging. I particularly like to see more e-commerce support for wordpress.

Really neat article. But please don’t promote plugins or themes that violate WordPress’ GPL license:

http://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/

Good to know Steven, thanks.

I’ve use wordpress as an Infoscreen (for public announcements)! Loads a new post every 20 sec. Is about to be implementet on all the schools in our community. Innstalled via templatede only (soon to be found in the template directory on wordpress.org.

Sorry – the demo is in norwegian…

Great to see what you can do with wordpress. I built a site in Joomla! thinking WP would not be able to handle my needs. I was wrong and just finished re-building in WP. love it.

Thanks for the link love on my vnovember ffffound style blog. I still use it on a regular basis as a source of inspiration and I highly recommend it to everyone who can’t get a ffffound invite!

Wow, pretty excellent information, thanks. Was wondering recently how I could use WP to do more than brochure sites.

Rick,
I agree that it’s not the ideal choice for wiki’s and forums. The situation where I would consider using WP for this purpose would be for a small add on to a site, not a wiki or forum that was expected to draw a lot of traffic and need a lot of features. Some developers would rather use WordPress for a site with this purpose than try to learn something new if they doubt they’ll use it again.

From a web dev standpoint, all the WP hype is annoying… especially using it in non-traditional blogging standpoints. Mostly I’m not a WP fan because it’s overly annoying to customise when there are far better CMS out there that allow for much better design implementation, accessibility, and … well… anything else. I understand it’s easier to use, but when you start deviating from it’s primary objective the point is lost completely on me.
Far more robust applications could be built in the time spent trying to make your base application work in WP, not to mention you don’t have to work with the weirdness that is the theming. I may just be slightly bitter since I convert designs to a modified WP with a custom plugin that really sucks and makes my job ever so annoying.
I guess my point is that if you need an app that is a blog and you know nothing web-related, go with WP; if you need an app that is not a blog, do not use WP. Props to everyone who slagged through it to be innovative with WP but, honestly, the time could have been better spent making a robust app that’s built for itself.
Not to mention that PHP is quickly becoming deprecated.

How about Scriblio, a library catalogue?

http://about.scriblio.net/

Thank you for the great article, it is going to keep me busy for awhile.

Paul

I never knew that wordpress could be used for so much.

Danielle

Nice examples !

It’s pretty clever what you can do with these WordPress Plugins. Though sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch and you’d be better off using a dedicated product.

Definitely for forums, etc, but perhaps also for job boards. I’d rather use something like Easy Job Boards.

An additional application that I’ve seen Wordpress used for is a corporate intranet. I haven’t seen a whole lot of talk about it though.

Opps. I should have linked that WP Wiki Plugin. Done now

Hey nice post. I’ll be trying to use wordpress for a little social network in a couple of months… (no, not like buddypress)

Great article! I’ve been thinking of new ways to use Wordpress. I’m probably going to try and develop a sheet music download site using it. I’ll definitely follow the e-commerce information, my sister was working on a site for the store she owns. This would be great

I wanted to add another important use of WordPress to your list: Using WordPress to power small business websites (even when no blog is involved).

The majority of the U.S. economy, and to varying degrees around the world, is powered by Small Business.

Unfortunately, when it comes to websites and CMS, the typical small companies using leading edge technology like WordPress or content management systems tend to be tech types who understand the myriad benefits of a CMS over a web 1.0 website.

A growing number of companies like mine that perform Internet Marketing and website design for small business are building all of our traditional small business websites on WordPress, even if the site has nothing to do with blogging or have a blog.

The list of advantages to small business are quite long but the biggies include WordPress’ built in seo-goodness, dirt-cheap web hosting, extensibility, and the ability for the small business owner to make their own simple text/photo changes via the WordPress visual editor (rather than paying me or another web developer every time).

Also key is the blogging functionality of WordPress. It’s a natural area of a small business to post content like Specials and other things that while not directly a blog, function like a blog. Ask a small business owner if they want to blog and they’ll think you’ve gone mad – show them how to use a blog to publish their restaurant’s nightly specials without paying for web dev services and they’ll give you a big hug.

Cheers!

- Julian

Thanks for the comment Julian. Yes, I think WordPress is a great CMS option for small businesses. I’ve been using more on client sites for that purpose rather than just blogs.

Hey thanks nice post. yYou gave me some ideas.

anyone who managed to get the WP-CRM to work with wordpress 2.7.1 and all the plugins? I did not get 2 plugins to work and without those 2 the CRM does not work.

any help would be appreciated as im not a wp-guru.

Thanks for the tips regarding blogging, it was very helpful.

hello webmaster,you should let us know where to download this wp themes.

The geo-blogging theme (gMaps) is available for purchase at the following address – http://wpmupremium.com/blog/2009/05/04/wpmu-gmaps/

This is really a brilliant post, wordpress plugins really extend the capabilities to the limits. I picked up a wordpress review plugin from http://www.wordpressreviewplugin.info/ and it has ton’s of features with the CSV uploads feature.

Also can some one help me to build a directory site with wordpress or is there some plugin available ?

This is a great site and I’m glad I found it. Very nice and useful article.
Thanks

Great post. Found really useful plugins and themes here. Will try them out soon. Thanks for sharing.

I don’t understand why MyReviewPlugin or WP Review Engine wasn’t mentioned instead of WP Review Site. WP Review Site is the worst review plugin available.

MyReviewPlugin easily handles business directories too…

And they’re both cheaper than WP Review Site…

Me myself was turning wordpress into a job board soon, trying a couple of theme that I found interesting..

WPMU Premium is now ThePremiumPress, where gMaps (the theme mentioned above in the main article as the Geo-Blogging theme) v.1.0.2 has just been released with full BuddyPress support making it a LBS in a box!

http://thepremiumpress.com/products/gmaps/

I knew Hootsuite would be on this, I tried to go from Tweetdeck to Hootsuite but it just didn’t happen, I dislike Hootsuit allot but I suppose that is down to my personal preference